Fretting Googler retracts anti-Google+ rant

Please don't fire me!

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A Google engineer who accidentally published a long rant about the failings of Google+ has since issued an apologetic make-up piece, explaining why he has taken the piece down, how kind Google are for not immediately firing him and that really Steve Yegge is a lowly oompa-loompa who knows nothing and to whom nobody should pay any attention, least of all the media who have been lapping up his 4,700-word rant in a frenzied blood lust.

Yegge, who works as a staff software engineer in the Chocolate Factory's cloudy systems, used a post on Google+ to criticise Google for failing to understand the importance of platforms. He cited Google+ as a prime example of Google's focus on product at the expense of platforms – a "knee-jerk reaction". The problem was that he accidentally set the post to be available publicly, instead of just to internal Google users. He took the original down pretty sharpish, but it is still readable here.

Please realize, though, that even now, after six years, I know astoundingly little about Google. It's a huge company and they do tons of stuff, and I work off in a little corner of the company (both technically and geographically) that gives me very little insight into anything else going on there. So my opinions, even though they may seem well-formed and accurate, really are just a bunch of opinions from someone who's nowhere near the center of the action – so I wouldn't read too much into anything I said."

He didn't quite go so far as to declare that Google+ was a stunning innovation that actually does everything right and is definitely better than Facebook, but we think that might be implied.

Of all the comments posted on his retraction, one simply read: "Do not worry, there are plenty of jobs at Facebook." ®